


Industrial Run

by Merfilly



Category: Birds of Prey (Comic), DCU (Comics)
Genre: Gen, Mission Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-06
Updated: 2015-03-06
Packaged: 2018-03-16 14:30:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,398
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3491828
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merfilly/pseuds/Merfilly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Oracle listens, and watches, as Black Canary handles a small mission.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Industrial Run

**Author's Note:**

> Setting this in Dixon Era Birds of Prey, fairly early. Black Canary's age is given in JLA: Year One as 19, if I recall right. The thirteen years on the west coast is mentioned/inferred from ages given in Mike Grell's run on the Green Arrow book. Often, I prefer to use the time-moves-on approach instead of the ever-condensing comic book timeline.

Oracle scanned the cameras, looked at the timing on their panning, then set up her logarithm to stutter their views in such a way as to buy time for her operative. She wasn't taking any chances, when Black Canary had so recently recovered from a gunshot wound to her shoulder.

"You have the path marked out?" she verified over the receiver.

"Stop worrying, O, and just tell me when." Black Canary hated to be babied, Oracle had found out. It was almost worse than trying to work with a recently wounded Bat.

"...and go," Oracle replied as the timing settled. She listened as the experienced hero started moving through the factory, letting her audio matching software confirm that Black Canary was following the path they had agreed upon to avoid the regular guards on their rounds. The cameras were obeying Oracle's commands, rendering her operative invisible to the monitors at the factory.

"I smell dogs," Black Canary said. "Wet ones."

"Should only be two, and they should be leashed. The wet means they've passed through the venting rooms on their last pass, which confirms they are on their normal rounds. They should stay ahead of you by enough distance to keep your scent from catching their attention." Oracle hoped nothing deviated from plan, especially her operative. She had sabotaged the plans on the server and Oracle had burned a favor owed so that Catwoman had stolen the actual physical plans, but Black Canary had to get the one working model out of the factory.

Blue Beetle was going to owe her for this bit of corporate espionage, but he had been right. The design for the small anti-personnel protection device could too easily be corrupted to something of mass destruction capabilities. It was one reason his company had not begun producing it before someone stole the research.

"Too many shoulds in that sentence for my peace of mind," Black Canary said after she completed the dash through one of the more open bays.

"I have faith in you," Oracle told her. "If retrieval proves impossible, you have the white phosphorous to slag it completely."

"I like Beetle too much to break his toys unless I absolutely have to," Black Canary replied. She then drew in a breath and held it as she stopped. The mastermind was tense as this was not a planned stop. Her hands hovered over the keys to reset the camera hack, but then her operative was moving again by the sound of the changing machines in the background.

"Intrusion?" Oracle asked, reminding herself again to put a tactile pad into the costume Black Canary wore so she could tap out Morse Code answers if needed.

"Foreman must have been working late, but I should still be in camera shadow; I was counting."

Oracle looked up at her parallel of the camera feed. "Can't see you, so good job."

"Gee, thanks. It's not like this is my first time breaking into a secure facility." There wasn't much heat in the words, but Oracle got the point. She was fast reevaluating how touchy a Bird was in comparison to a Bat. The hacker settled back to just listen and monitor, trying not to micromanage this run. It had left a bad taste in her mouth to get called down on the very thing she used to get so heated at Batman about when she'd still been able to run her own missions.

Her eyes strayed to the plushie of Batgirl beside the monitor, forcing her bitterness back after a long moment. That she was in the chair, that she was never going to make those runs again would have been so much easier to swallow if she'd been hurt in the line of doing what she did back then. But no, that smiling bastard had done it solely to hurt her father. It galled her, even when she'd mostly wanted to retire at that point.

"O? We have a problem. Keep the cameras off me so they don't have an edge, but you don't have to be pretty about it in just a few moments," Black Canary told her, breaking Oracle back fully to the matter at hand.

"Company, I take it," Oracle said, but then she lost clear audio feed as Canary damped her end of the conversation. Even damped down, Oracle soon knew why as the high pitch of multiple Canary Cries, the little sonic bombs, went off and added their chaos to the level of noise coming out of the factory itself. Nor did Black Canary unmute the receivers, as she was quickly engaging in combat behind the sonic barrage. Oracle thought about overriding it, getting a better grip on the situation through audio clues, but the chances of another Cry being used held her off that route.

She looked up and saw the monitor was clearly picking up the fight as her operative had to leave the pre-planned path. Four men, and Oracle realized they'd been just out of camera range, were engaged by the brutal martial artist. Feet and fists were doing quick work against the attackers. Oracle wondered, knowing that shoulder had to still be tender, if her operative had studied under Richard Dragon to acquire pain-blocking techniques.

Oracle cursed softly as her shadowing of the control boards told her security had picked up the fight too. "You're going to have company very soon, BC. Start evac."

On the tail end of the word, she saw the last of the four men go down, and her operative run to the secure cabinet where the prototype was.

Audio resumed its normal level, and Oracle heard the intruder alarm. "Nothing shows they've managed to duplicate it," Black Canary said with barely a hint of ragged breathing. It made Oracle wonder if she would have kept such a good fighting shape. Nineteen at the formation of the League, thirteen years spent out west with Green Arrow, and it had been over a year since she'd come back, but Black Canary could run laps around some of the younger heroes still.

"You need to be moving," Oracle said firmly.

"Will. Just… a… second." On the camera for that bay, Oracle could see her agent place a small strip of explosive tape on the hinges. That was often a weaker structure point than the locking mechanism. Black Canary moved back, and let it do its work, then planted her foot into the door, neatly breaking it in so she could access the device. A quick prying of the ruined door and she snagged the small device, slipping it into the satchel she had slung tight to her body. "Moving!"

"That was effective, but the guards are coming in through the passage you used," Oracle reported calmly, flipping the camera control to just block them in random locations plus the one closest to her operative.

"Second exit strategy," Black Canary told her.

"We didn't plan a second exit strategy!" Oracle exclaimed, feeling her blood pressure spike. Then the sounds of a grunt, boots landing on metal, and the factory noises changing pitch registered. "There's sky lights in there."

"Bingo! You don't chase people like Deadshot and Catwoman without learning to pay attention to the ceiling." More noises of effort as Black Canary climbed, leaped, and crawled through the upper girder work ensued before a new alarm went off, alerting that a skylight had been breached.

"I don't see any guards near enough to get to the roof access quickly; if you hightail it, you should be clear."

"On it, O!" Black Canary promised her before saving her breath for the run. Oracle listened to the familiar sound of boots on a roof mixed with the exertion of leaping from one to another, then the skilled jumps using outer ledges and fire escapes to get back down. Black Canary was a damn fine athlete, but even she was breathing hard by the time she got to where she'd hidden her bike… without crossing a single guard's path.

"Oh you're good," Oracle said, not really meaning to.

"Don't I just know it, too?" Black Canary answered that. "Tell Blue Beetle I'll see him at his office and he better have Cantonese for me. And wine."

Oracle laughed, opening another channel to do that. "I will. Try not to break any land speed records on your way."

"No promises."


End file.
